Prior context and the perception of lexically ambiguous sentences
Memory & CognitionPublished 1 January 1977Open access
Virginia M. Holmes, R. Arwas, Merrill F. Garrett
Citations42
SJR quartileQ1
SJR score1.15
SNIP1.32
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TL;DR
It was concluded that both meanings of a lexically ambiguous sentence must be computed, even when prior context makes one meaning more plausible than the other.
Abstract
The perceptual complexity of lexically ambiguous and unambiguous sentences was compared in three experiments. In Experiment 1, the report of ambiguous words from rapidly presented ambiguous sentences was worse than the report of corresponding unambiguous words from unambiguous sentences. Results of Experiment 2 showed that the effect was not reduced by the presence of prior biasing context within the sentence. Experiment 3 repeated the finding with a sentence meaning classification task. It was concluded that both meanings of a lexically ambiguous sentence must be computed, even when prior context makes one meaning more plausible than the other.
Keywords
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